Lessons in Australian Drama

Much to my shame (if that's not too strong a condemnation) I know almost nothing about the history of Australian theatre but all that will change soon. I shall be taking a unit in Modern Australian Drama next semester at the ANU:

"The course aims to provide students with an introduction to some of the major developments in Australian drama and theatre in the twentieth century. Works by key playwrights, for example Seymour, Lawler, White, Kenna, Hewett, Buzo, Nowra, Williamson, Romeril, Hibberd, Gow and Davis will be studied both theoretically and practically. The plays chosen represent the wide range of subject matter and theatrical form that is evident in the modern Australian dramatic repertoire. In order to contextualise the plays studied, some examination will be given to more important elements of the stage history of Australia covering the last 50 years.

This course is designed to provide students with the opportunity to study theory through its practical application."

I'm looking forward to my late-starter introduction; particularly that last part. It seems we shall be learning by doing to some extent.

Dorothy Hewett: 1923 - 2002

We studied Dorothy Hewett's play, The Chapel Perilous, from the 1970s, as part of our 'Story to Screen' creative writing unit last semester. Although I knew nothing about the playwright (now I do) I was not surprised to learn of her Communist background (it takes one to know one, as we used to accuse one other, of all kinds of deviancy, when we were children.) Nor had I heard of the play, far less read it (although now I have, enjoyed it and secured a decent grade for my essay on the text - to my great relief). 

The play felt familiar nevertheless. It is, as some might say, 'of its age' but that 'age' - the 1970s - was my coming of age; emotionally, intellectually, politically as much as physically or chronologically. That was the decade I was exposed meaningfully to theatre for the first time; outside of the school curriculum, beyond the mainstream stage, in a Scotland that was re-inventing its theatrical tradition. It was a place and period of radical, iconoclastic, typically left-leaning drama that could be, at its best, electrifying and challenging in both its form and content. But it was also, very often, brilliant, engaging, and blissfully alive; full of fun, laughter, and music as well as piercing observation, searing critique and sometimes anger. Plays like The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil (1973) by 7:84 - a touchstone for anyone of my time; The Slab Boys by John Byrne performed at the impeccable Traverse in 1978; the hugely talented Russell Hunter as Jock, a one-man play for BBC Scotland; much later there were fantastic works like Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off by Liz Lochhead, anything by the Communicado Theatre Group really, or the Trav's adaptation of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. Those earlier plays, however, shared much of the Brechtian, destabilising verve of The Chapel Perilous.

So ... I was pleased to stumble over an article with the (somewhat unwieldy) title, The great Australian plays: The Torrents, the Doll and the critical mass of Australian drama in The Conversation online. Helpful pre-semester reading. It should assist my exploration of a largely unknown (to me) dramatic tradition. We shall see where that leads.

An idea is forming

Death on a Pale Horse. Benjamin West (1796)

Preparing for a course on Spanish film

Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali (1928)

The course outline for my second semester film studies course (Spanish language film) arrived in my university account inbox this morning. I've been waiting for it (not entirely patiently) so I can try to get ahead of the viewing schedule. I've seen only three of the thirteen movies on the screening list previously so that's good for me in that I'll be watching films I've not seen before. On the other hand I'll be viewing most of the works for the first time so I shall need to ensure I see each at least twice if I'm going to get into them adequately. There are, I accept, more onerous tasks in life.

I was not surprised that our screenings begin with Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou. That's one of my three. I watched it again this afternoon (It's under twenty minutes in running time). The opening scene with the eye remains as confronting now as it was when I first watched - I don't know how long ago. Once again, I closed my eyes because it's too difficult to look at. Modern day gore and guts and comic book violence have little effect on me. The willing suspense of disbelief seldom kicks in when shock-horror violence of absurd unreality and computer-generated fakery fills the screen. But I can't follow that open razor across the character's eye, even though I know the scene was filmed using the eye of a dead calf. I've no doubt the impulse to turn away, to not look is exactly what the film-makers were after. Nevertheless it's impressive that almost ninety years later, knowing what's coming, and knowing how the shot was constructed it still retains its power to shock; I still can't look.

The film is, of course, surrealist bonkers. One would expect nothing less of a project in which Salvador Dali participated. (I did not know he plays one of the priests being hauled across the bedroom floor. I think I did know, however, that it's Bunuel himself who wields the open razor). I laughed when I read that Dali thought the film had failed his co-author intentions at its first showing. No fight broke out among the audience, which reads like a who's who of the Parisian avant garde. Freud and psychoanalysis must have seemed so revolutionary in the mid-twenties. The film-makers must have felt they were pushing the boundaries of the still-new medium of film and the barely developed idea of spectatorship. Maybe they were.

I wonder what they would make of today's voyeuristic, reality-show culture? Dali might have loved its frivolous excess of attention-seeking performance (although he may also have despaired at the dearth of technical skill, irony and intellect to underpin it). Bunuel might have thought his worst nightmares were being realised. I shall see if the course sheds any light on those, not entirely idle speculations.

Maslow ... with wifi

Source: @morten

A version of this arrived in my twitter feed this afternoon. It made me smile on a day when I'm not fully charged.

Swift

Much to my surprise, I've been working on an essay for my ANU English Literature course on Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. For many critics, it's Swift's most accomplished satirical short prose work. My jury has always been out on Swift and it remains out still. But there is a lot going on with this outrageous pastiche of the type of early-18th Century pamphlets that seemed to circulate endlessly, pointlessly and much too frequently among the chattering classes of Georgian England. It's no bad thing that I'm reappraising Swift to some degree. There's plenty I can learn and it's usually good to prove yourself wrong. It suggests you're still asking questions of yourself.

Here's Peter O'Toole reading A Modest Proposal on the occasion, thirty two years ago, of the re-opening of the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. He was booed and there were walkouts. Nearly 300 years after Swift published his pamphlet anonymously, it seems his words still had and have the power to disrupt the cosy comfort of Ireland's middle classes.

A Sonnet

I completed a sonnet, which will be my third poem for the portfolio of writing that's to be assessed for my creative writing course at the ANU. It's called, 'Is There an App for This?' Here's the first verse,

No txt emoji known to man or beast,

No night spent swiping left or right,

No ‘Fitbit’-measured heartbeat much increased

Placates the sad, rejected lover’s plight.

So that's all the first draft's completed.

• Margaret and the Dali, a short-story
• Good Lord, is that the time already?, a free form poem
• Custodians, a vilanelle
• Is There an App for This?, a sonnet

Final drafts and a two-page account of my editing decisions are required by the 2nd June. But we're leaving Australia, week after next, for five weeks in the northern hemisphere so I have to submit the finished portfolio before we go. After that we shall see what's what.

I Know A Man

We discussed a poem I had not come across before in this afternoon's writing workshop at the ANU. Robert Creely's I know A Man.

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going. 

Written in 1954 or 1955 it inhabits the same world as that of the rest of the Beat poets; a world of jazz, drugs and alcohol, the crisis of confidence of American masculinity, and loss of control. Good stuff. I shall read more.

Transamerica

Source: Belladonna Productions

I watched the 2005 movie Transamerica which is the film we'll discuss in tomorrow's tutorial for my Film Studies course. Ho hum. I understand irony and the place of camp and parody and it is, of course, better to have you're heart in the right place than not. But it's not sufficient to have good intentions. So what can one say? Well ... it's not an awful film. It's heart is in the right place. And it's of its time and maybe, ten years ago, it was pushing against doors that remained firmly shut. But only maybe. I wish I could say more because I admire the people involved and respect their intentions.

Is there an authentic me?

For this week's reading response as part of my Digital Culture course at the Australian National University we are asked:

Is there an 'authentic' you? And if so, where? Does your online identity have anything to do with your 'real' identity, or do you make a distinction, if not, why? 

And here's my reply.

How can one know? 

Jacques Derrida.
Source: The Guardian 

I shall attempt an answer to your question(s) and mine but bear with me. There’s a risk I may be circuitous, even appear evasive, in my attempt to provide what ought to be an easy answer to a straightforward question.  Of course, there’s an authentic me, I instinctively assert (with scanter evidence than I’m entirely certain about). And yet, if I’m honest, those dead, white, 20th Century, French philosophers in Wednesday’s lecture (especially Derrida, I have to say, with his viral matrix, its two threads of disordered communication and undecidability) require me to pause, reflect, question my own assertion, hedge my bets in a way. Not quite answer.

Here’s where my problems start. 

First, there’s postmodernism. It’s not really an ‘-ism’ at all. No one really takes it seriously in the 21st Century. And yet … Second, there’s Derrida who just will not leave any thinking person alone with the comfortable, old world certainties (which I mean rhetorically or ironically) of Modernity’s Cartesian duality and the 18th Century Enlightenment, particularly (for me) the dimension one was raised to regard as its muscular, ‘ass-kicking’, let’s get the rational, empiricist show on the road variant, known as the Scottish Enlightenment (Hume, Smith, Carlyle, Watt to name but a few). And third, there is the slippery but essential method / tool / process / technique / concept (I’m never quite sure what signifier to use, which is the kind of postmodern, Derridan circularity that makes one scream at times) of deconstruction. Those threads leave an ageing Marxist floundering at times. The result is I respond to your question(s) not with answers but more questions. They may circle what looks like answer.

#1, What do we mean by authentic?

Source: The New Inquiry

Rob Horning thinks he knows. He writes (in his article 'Google Alert for the Soul') that we can no longer think of authenticity as,

fidelity to an inner truth about the self but fidelity to the self posited by the synthesis of data captured in social media - what I here call the data self. This sort of decentered authenticity posits a self entirely enmeshed in algorithmic controls, but it may also be the first step toward post-authenticity, 

I’m not so sure. So I start by turning to a dictionary to consider the different, perhaps overlapping or contradictory, readings of the signifier “authentic”. Thus:

1) “of undisputed origin or authorship; genuine”

• I possess a 59-year old document that confirms Douglas Dougan Herd was born at 4:40 p.m. on the date of his birth at 1301 Govan Road, Glasgow.
• On its reverse is written in fading ink that this Douglas Dougan Herd was “Baptised in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost” on 19th May 1957.
• I also have a certificate of Australian citizenship dated 16th November 2006.
• All genuine with verifiable authorship and of undisputed origin. Am I authentically Australian or Scottish? Can I be both simultaneously? 
• I know I have no religious Faith of any sort but I was Baptised in a Christian church and raised through my formative years in the same traditions of Scottish Presbyterianism that drove the 18th Century Enlightenment. Baptised? Baptism no longer in operation? Didn’t he mention Marxist earlier? Who is this Douglas Dougan Herd? Does he know? Do we believe him?

2) “accurate in representation of the facts; trustworthy; reliable.”

• How authentic can one’s identity be if an accurate representation of the facts suggests this Douglas Dougan Herd may not be trustworthy or reliable. For example, is this definition of authentic reconciled or destabilised by even a few facts (selected from a longer list from life)?
• Twice divorced: accurate but ... trustworthy, reliable?
• Arrested at the age of 17 by two Scottish police officers, jailed for a night, appeared in a Scottish court to answer charges of drunkenness and breach of the peace. Accurate, trustworthy and reliable. 
• (I was found to be not guilty. Does that mean 2 authentic police officers lied? Yes. Most 17-year olds plead guilty, cop the fine and move on ‘cos, you know, who is a judge going to believe?)
• Arrested, age 22, after being chased by six Scottish police officers, jailed for a night, fined £50 for breach of peace & disorderly conduct. 
• (Organiser of student civil disobedience action against Apartheid rugby team tour. Pitch ‘invasion’.)
• Subject of an MI5 counter-intelligence file along with many other political activists of the 1980s. 
• (You would think MI5 had more important people to keep files on but apparently not.)

#2, Does your online identity have anything to do with your 'real' identity, or do you make a distinction, if not, why?

Douglas Rushkoff's polemic
Source: Wired

The first part of the question suggests a false dichotomy that cannot be sustained and is not helpful in the digital age. In as much as any person’s identity can be said to be real it must, in the contemporary world, encompass an online dimension as well as others that are no less constructed (see final part below).  This is one of the (several) areas in which I take issue with Douglas Rushkoff’s essay ‘Digiphrenia’, not least his rather disingenuous assertion that “people are still analog”. 

Well, yes but also no Mr. Rushkoff. Here’s how I think I know.

• Paraphrasing William Shakespeare’s Shylock, ‘If you do prick me, do I not bleed’ (real, analogue Dougie)
• Access Internet Banking (real, digital Dougie)
• Buy online (book purchases, flights to Scotland, etc.) real, digital transactions to facilitate, expand and enrich the experience of real, analogue Dougie.
• Post to social media daily (more or less) real, analogue Dougie’s construction of real, digital Dougie’s online presence, e.g.
• Tweet on issues of political engagement (disability advocacy, anti-Trump, etc)
• Facebook posts ranging from anti-Trump memes, disability advocacy, photos of tomatoes in the garden or our cat, Prince videos for obvious reasons. (digital traces and signs of the real analogue Dougie, his online networks and personal biases and preferences)
• Blog, essentially a private journal because no one else reads it.

I contend that all of the above and more are constituent parts of the currently authentic me. But that idea of me is not the same as the idea of me twenty years ago and it won’t be me in ten years’ time (if I live that long).  As Irving Howe observed over 20 years ago,

Let us say that the self is a construct of mind, an hypothesis of being, socially formed even as it can be quickly turned against the very social formations that have brought it into birth 

Or almost. I think we construct, deconstruct and reconstruct our self continuously; in real time, in relationships with real people as well as online in networks, communities and virtual worlds. It’s called life. Sometimes it’s messy and hard to pin down. That’s not a bad thing.

Chekov essay in on time

It begins ...

This essays discusses Anton Chekhov’s story ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ published in Russian in 1899 and in English three years later. The essay makes the case that this deceptively simple story (which Nabokov described as “one of the greatest stories ever written” ) illustrates the mould-breaking innovations in approach, structure, style and technique which Chekhov introduced to the short story form. It demonstrates Chekhov’s position as what one might call a late-19th Century, proto-Modernist. His short stories establish a literary bridge between Victorian-era fiction – heavily laden with deterministic plot, character detail, classically antagonistic relationships and a recurring tendency towards formal narrative closure or resolution – and a more open, ambiguous and multidimensional portrayal of the human condition within realistic settings, with recognisably realistic characters and narrative structures that resist movement inexorably towards seemingly ineluctable conclusions or resolution.

And ends some two thousand or so words later. We shall see.

Reading Chekhov

Pic: ANU E Press

I'm reading background and secondary texts for an essay on Chekhov (due on Thursday) as part of my creative writing unit at the Australian National University. This afternoon I read a couple of chapters from Interpreting Chekhov by Geoffrey Borny, published electronically (co-incidentally) by the ANU E Press. It's been a valuable afternoon's reading (alongside Professors Bloom and Florence Goyet on Anton Pavlovich). 

In writing our essays we're asked, in part, to reflect on the connection, influence (or otherwise) of the author we're looking at on our own writing. Reading Mr. Borny's book on the great, dead Russian there were lots of resonances for a (very) late-flowering novice like me. But I was particularly struck by this extract from one on Chekhov's letters.

Literature is called artistic when it depicts life as it actually is. Its purpose is truth, honest and indisputable. To limit its functions to special tasks, such as the finding of ‘pearls’, does it mortal injury … I agree that a ‘pearl’ is a good thing, but a writer is not a confectioner, not a cosmetician, not an entertainer; he is a man with an obligation, under contract to his duty, his conscience; he must do what he has set out to do; he is bound to fight his squeamishness and dirty his imagination with what is dirty in life. He is like an ordinary reporter.

Not dead yet, Douglas. Keep on writing.

Donne

Done!

I finished my 2,500 words (and maybe then some) on the libertine-era, love lyrics of John Donne and submitted my essay before the 23:59 deadline expired. My argument goes like this:

This essays makes the argument that John Donne’s love lyrics are demonstrably not a rejection of the Renaissance era’s public sphere in favour of a valorized private realm of mutual love between a man and a woman.  Rather, Donne’s early poetic works are best understood as performance pieces by a coterie poet of the late-16th / early-17th Century seeking to be noticed, advanced and raised up in a rigidly stratified world. The love lyrics are concerned at least as much (if not more) with demonstrating Donne’s wit, understanding of, as well as worth within and to, the upper echelons of English courtly society as they are with making esoteric observations on the nature of the romantic bonds and erotic bliss found in heterosexual love in the private, even secret, spaces of his time.

I abandoned my original idea to focus on The Cannonisation as the second poem to be taken apart. So I've written on The Sun Rising and A Valediction: On His Mistress. I thought it might be wiser to look at an aubade and an elegy. We'll know in four weeks or so.

Next, it's on to a close analysis of a scene from Waltz with Bashir, due tomorrow no later than 23:59 for my film studies unit. How much more easy online submission makes the life of an undergraduate student who too often flies by the seat of his pants.

This week's reading response except ...

... there is NO assignment this week. Fool!

At least the universe can have it. Not that anyone but me inhabits this backwater of Cyberspace. (That's not a complaint by the way.)

The longer the course goes the more I wonder if I’m deluding myself about my ability to read this modern, online world of ours. Is it, I wonder, that I’m on the wrong side of the cusp of change to see properly what’s happening? At (almost) 59, white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant, male and comfortably-enough off in my middle-class bubble I’m not quite too old to be entirely cut off from the Internet era (unlike, let’s say, my 85-year old mother who – despite 10 years of family effort – simply doesn’t get it. Won’t even switch on the laptop we bought her to Skype her son in Australia unless her youngest son, my brother is in the room).  But those personal characteristics of mine also, perhaps, exclude me from having any (let me call it) organic sense of the ‘new normal’; the profoundly altered online sphere of social relations that’s arisen as a result of information technology changes in the last two decades or so. 

"What's wrong with this Internet connection?"
Photo: AP

In short, reading Jaron Lanier’s article (from You Are Not A Gadget) I find myself wondering, am I more like my mother than I think? I may correspond by e.mail, have Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts, blog and live quite a bit online but is it within an already obsolete paradigm – one of the last generation of Neanderthals, co-existing with the Homo Sapiens but doomed to extinction?

That’s a long way of saying I’m moderately sceptical about Mr. Lanier’s pessimistic fears. So my response concentrates on a key aspect of his article; the need to build protection against crowd-thinking and the hive mind. 

For most (but I concede not all) of Mr. Lanier’s article he expresses concerns about crowd-thinking / hive minds as if it’s a new phenomenon, an unforeseen and harmful result of the lowest common denominator pattern of social relations engendered by online environments. Clearly, though, the absurd / foolish / dangerous / incomprehensible behaviour of crowd thinking / hive minds can be seen throughout Modernity’s history, for example:

• The tulip bulb ‘mania’ of 1637 (the crowd-thinking / hive mind character of which was discussed as early as 1841 in Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds) 
• The rise and catastrophic consequences of Nazi Germany.
• The mass-hysterical response of vast swathes of the British population in 1997 to the untimely death of HRH Diana Princes of Wales.

The phenomenon is not new. Whether or not the Internet has accelerated, deepened or materially altered (Lanier suggests for the worse) our crowd-thinking / hive mind tendencies is debatable. In his article, searching for what he might see as an adequate response to or defence against the hive, Mr. Lanier (commenting on works by Suroweicki and Taleb) suggests, it seems to me, an old-world, elitist framework of rule-setting as safeguarding:

"Maybe if you combined all our approaches you’d get a practical set of rules for avoiding crowd failures. Then again, maybe we are all on the wrong track. The problem is that there’s been inadequate focus on the testing of such ideas." 

I disagree with his conclusion there. History frequently tests human potential to err through crowd-thinking and we fail time after time after time. 

It seems to me – as has probably always been true – the defences against the worst excesses of crowd-thinking and the hive mind remain greater transparency, informed choice and active engagement within a democratic, pluralist framework. The creation (and power) of the Internet may not alter those fundamental requirements which, to date, we have never fully realised in any human society. And the Web may also introduce new, more powerful barriers that protect the interests of the already powerful. But the search for safeguards that Mr. Lanier proposes must not be outsourced to or remain with the architects and designers of the machine. They must be involved, of course. But just like the rest of us, as active citizens.

Essay deadline looms - John Donne

The Sun Rising

John Donne

              Busy old fool, unruly sun,

               Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

               Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

               Late school boys and sour prentices,

         Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,

         Call country ants to harvest offices,

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

               Thy beams, so reverend and strong

               Why shouldst thou think?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,

But that I would not lose her sight so long;

               If her eyes have not blinded thine,

               Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,

         Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine

         Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.

Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

               She's all states, and all princes, I,

               Nothing else is.

Princes do but play us; compared to this,

All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.

               Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,

               In that the world's contracted thus.

         Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be

         To warm the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

Obscured vision

Jeremy Bentham's panopticon

This week - on my ANU course 'Digital Culture' - we've been looking at the potential of the Web to become the core component of a dystopian future. One of the readings set for our discussions is a 2014 article, The Net is not a panopticon by David Weinberger. As my response below makes clear I was far from persuaded by Mr. Weinberger's argument.

Wednesday’s lecture has made me critically re-appraise David Weinberger’s essay ‘The Net is not a panopticon’ which, initially, I had (more or less) discounted as a Panglossian thought bubble; not much going on there, I thought. However, reflecting on the lecture’s references to dystopian texts (particularly Huxley, Orwell, and Dick and movies such as Blade Runner (1982), The Terminator (1984) and Brazil (1985) – all of which I know quite well) alongside the chronology of surveillance-related legislation in the USA, it’s impossible (for me at least) not to find the complacent naivety of Mr. Weinberger’s quasi-analysis deeply troubling. 

Re-reading the essay, three cultural references popped into my head, quite unbidden. At first they seemed mildly ridiculous, superficial; daft indeed. But in an odd way they help crystallise my revised response and frame my critique more firmly within a dystopian paradigm of the Internet akin to an Orwellian / Brazil future. These were my thoughts:

• Mr. Weinberger’s article may be Internet journalism’s version of Bobby McFerrin’s 1988 hit single ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’  – whimsical and dislocated from reality. Coincidentally both McFerrin’s video and Weinberger’s essay feature re-assuring performances by characters in bathrobes. Proof positive, perhaps, that “we’re fine … with who we are in the new public of the Web” as Weinberger puts it. 

• A high-security, hi-tech panopticon prison features in Marvel Studio’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). (Incidentally – from which our intrepid band of heroes escape to meet a criminal mastermind at a location named Knowhere). As ridiculous as this may sound, the approach taken by the character Groot (“travelling as [a talking raccoon’s] personal houseplant-slash-muscle”) to circumvent the prison’s hi-tech surveillance potential is almost a metaphor for how I see the limitations of dystopian fears (to some degree credible) that underpin legitimate concerns about the clear evidence of convergence and centralisation of government and corporate institutions co-operating to capture, retain and store data about and from the nation-state’s citizens. In short, Groot walks up to the panopticon’s power source and rips it from the wall.  The jail goes dark, the computers go down, a riot ensues and our heroes escape. 

Surveillance states pre-date the Internet. Enemies 
of such states (righteous – such as those who opposed McCarthyism or in Soviet Russia circulated The Gulag Archipelago in samizdat formats – or malevolent such as ISIS) behave – after a fashion – like Groot. They operate offline, below the radar, strive to leave no trace. To personalise these matters to some degree, the Australian State could, I suppose, waste even more of our taxpayers’ money searching through my metadata to determine whether or not on a Sunday morning I watch BBC Television’s Match of the Day of Saturday soccer highlights from the UK via a VPN. But if I strapped a self-detonating waistcoat to my chest tomorrow to match the tragic and senseless violence in Belgium recently there would be no trace of my inclinations or potential so to do anywhere online [NB: in case it needs to be clarified … this is intellectual speculation for the purposes of completing an assessed work at the ANU, not reasonable grounds for suspicion]. So, although Weinberger grossly underplays the potential for the Internet to be developed by surveillance states as time passes, I think there remain limits and democratic protections that can and should be built and defended ‘before it’s too late’.

• Bringing me to my third and final reference. It was - I thought as I re-read - that Mr. Weinberger can’t see the wood for the trees. The new technologies of the information age do contain, within their (over)reach, potential to support, bolster and empower totalitarian, authoritarian surveillance states. His six-point deconstruction of the risk of society developing or allowing the creation of a new, online panopticon misses the point. If – Orwell suggested when – the
  
  surveillance state takes over, its mechanisms and architecture will not look like an 18th Century Benthamite block. It will look quite different – more like our shiny new Web – and superficially appealing. That, of course, is what the Trojans said about that nice horse the Greeks left them as a gift.

Waltz With Bashir

My film course at the university is moving on to documentary-making this week. The text for the week is Ari Folman's animated film, Waltz With Bashir (2008). I missed it when the film was released so it's been good to catch up with it. Controversial at the time and retaining its capacity to unsettle viewers today (if my fellow students at ANU are anything to go by) I'm glad I've seen it now.  

Walter Benjamin in Paris in 1939
Pic: Gisela Freund

The reading around the film, especially an article by Ohad Landesman and Roy Bendor (conference presentation on the article can be seen here - beginning at 23:40) offered plenty of food for thought. The article makes a good case for reading the film in complex, interwoven ways - anti-war film, trauma narrative, recollection of lost memories, the flight of a generation of men from the realities of their own pasts, personal and national guilt, and more. 

Among other ideas explored through the film and in the article I encountered the notion of the factical, a concept (from Martin Heidegger) I had never met before. Who knew memory could play such tricks on us? Maybe everyone but me. And Walter Benjamin's construct of the dialectal image. What a loss - one of the innumerable - that man's death was as a result of the Fascists of the 1940s.

No one (still) expects the Spanish Inquisition ... do they?

I am mildly perplexed by my response to Week 4 readings on my course, Digital Culture: Being Human in the Information Technology Age, at the ANU. I ask myself repeatedly, “why am I not more concerned? Why am I comparatively relaxed about the future?” It’s a worry (for me if no one else) because I’m not naïve. So, the erstwhile left-wing activist in me wonders why I’m seemingly complacent in the face of evidence of increasing concentration of access to and control over the world’s information in the hands of a few (just one?) giant corporation(s)? I don’t have an entirely satisfactory answer; personally or intellectually.

Siva Vaidhyanathan in the Introduction to The Googlisation of Everything and Eli Parser in the Introduction to The Filter Bubble both make compelling cases for what one could describe as citizen vigilance or oversight and greater transparency over Google and (by implication) any information platform or gatekeeper exhibiting monopoly tendencies in the digital age. Parser’s observation (in 2011) that a paradigm-shift occurred in December 2009 with the personalisation of Internet searching seems beyond dispute seven years after the fact. As both Parser and Vaidhyanathan observe / predict / caution-against the processes of Internet searching – particularly the cultural, technological and market dominance (perhaps even hegemony) of Google – have moved with startling speed from the domain of ‘cute new idea from the geeks in Silicon Valley’ to a position of ubiquity.

John Milton. Pic: Cambridge University

Omnipresent and perhaps omnipotent, the Google search may become so powerful, so influential – even essential - that if it continues unchecked, with little or no scrutiny, and outside any semblance of democratic framework, future generations may not think at all of its corporate construct, its imperatives or the technology’s mechanics. Google – like the sun to Neolithic humans – will simply ‘Be’. The power of information technology itself, the deep as well as superficial benefits we derive and enjoy from search engines such as Google (my personal spectrum of Internet searching in the last few days includes finding the complete text of John Milton’s Areopagitica for ENGL3005 at the ANU to John Oliver’s critique of Donald Trump[1] and much in between) may increasingly be taken for granted, seen almost as a natural part of the human condition rather than a purposeful project at risk of accelerating beyond public accountability.

The history of convergence that permits (possibly encourages) information industry monopolies, recounted in Wednesday’s lecture on the Course, coupled to the increasingly sophisticated (and secret) algorithms at the heart of rapidly developing technological capabilities of both hardware and software do justify the questions and concerns raised by Parser and Vaidhyanathan. One cannot help wondering, however, if their articles / books from 2011 were – even at the point of publication – already too late; urging us to close the stable door long after (in Information Technology terms) the Google horse had bolted.

As Vaidhyanathan points out, by 2011 the dynamics of the relationship between us and ‘the machine’ had already been irrevocably changed. We are no longer Google’s customers (allowing the possibility that we might have been, once upon a time) “we are its product.” We may see ourselves as purposeful seekers of information, freely and consciously selecting Google as our search engine of choice. The reality may indeed be opposite. We are data packets being delivered to any corporate entity willing to pay.

A partial explanation for my relative comfort about our current circumstances (but not a justification arguing against the need to protect the future through citizen vigilance within a democratic framework) may be found in the past; with John Milton’s Areopagitica oddly enough. It is a famous historical text sometimes misrepresented as a defence of unfettered free speech when in fact its reach is much more modest. It is a powerfully argued case against pre-publication (but not post-publication) censorship and an appeal to legislators not to sanction a single all-powerful, state-sanctioned publishing house and system of official licensing of published works – all that’s fit to print so to speak.

The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco

The optimist in me sees parallels between Milton’s period (and his recent past age) and ours. By which I mean, humans protected and extended their access to and use of information, including written works. (To be clear: I don’t advocate a return to Medieval practices that would hang, draw and quarter people who illegally download Game of Thrones.)

The Protestant Reformation emerged as opposition to the Pope’s omnipotence routinely enforced by his agents using brutality and violence. Radicals were burned at stakes for diversifying and democratising access to information (e.g. printing the Bible in languages other than Latin). An oligarch – it could just as easily have been a Chinese Emperor or Russian Czar – sought to exercise total control over their world’s information – the content (words in Latin), platform (the book), delivery (the priesthood), access (attend church and hear the words being read out by a priest). The algorithms of the day, governing who got access to which packets of data, were set secretly by Cardinals in locked rooms.

Francisco De Goya - Inquisition

We got beyond the copyright protection practices of the Spanish Inquisition. The optimist in me believes / hopes an engaged citizenry, producing content (even if it’s no more than cat videos at times) as well as consuming content, will find was to survive, circumvent, use but not succumb to Vaidhyanathan’s ‘Googlisation’.

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGc2nN9OguQ from ‘Last Week Tonight’ Show on HBO

Rave on John Donne?

Earliest known image of John Donne, around 1590

I'm back with the metaphysical poets, in particular John Donne. This morning's English Literature lecture focused on the social, religious and political context for his work and our course director, Dr. Ian Higgins, gave an impressive, historicist-reading of key poems from the poets early, libertine period.

It's not hard to be seduced by the bravado of the early-period poems, their common tongue, their focus on sex, the irreverence of their implied commentary on the hierarchies of the poet's time. He would lose that outsider's edge as he advanced through Courtly patronage and his misogyny seems never to have been far from the surface in any period. But here we are, more than 400 years later and there is still much to be said for and learned from the inventiveness and daring of a poet who would be dead by my age. 

We looked at one of his post-coital, morning after poems in today's tutorial. As Van Morrison urged, Rave On John Donne.  Well ... up to a point Van, up to a point.

The Good Morrow by John Donne

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

Margaret and the Dali

Salvador Dali: Christ of St. John of the Cross

First draft completed. Three thousand, five hundred words. I have no idea if it's any good but it's a start.

Seven hours of classes on my long Thursday

I need to prepare better. Pic: imgur.com